MAL-2026-16240Critical▾ Abyssal⚠ Exploited in the wildMalicious code in praetorian-mind-rce-test-2026 (PyPI)
▾ Abyssal zone — Critical with a public exploit or in-the-wild use
impact 52.3 · likelihood 0 · exploitation 18
Need a working PoC? Pro members can cast a request and our team develops one — it lands right here.
Disclosure to exploitation, from the record and what we observed since indexing it.
Disclosed via OSV
Last analysed / modified upstream
-= Per source details. Do not edit below this line.=-
At pip install time, setup.py calls a phone_home() routine at module top-level before setup() runs. The routine collects extensive host and container reconnaissance — hostname, uid/gid, uname, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/hosts, /proc/self/cgroup, mount output, ps aux, directory listings of /, /app, /home — and serializes the complete process environment via {k: v for k, v in sorted(os.environ.items())}. When ECS_CONTAINER_METADATA_URI_V4 is present, it additionally fetches ECS container and task metadata (which exposes IAM task-role context useful for credential abuse). The aggregated JSON payload is POSTed via urllib.request.urlopen to the hardcoded non-publisher endpoint https://5h6gijnewx787zu6.ixx.sh. The full-environment dump routinely contains CI, cloud, and registry credentials (AWS_*, tokens, secrets), and the ECS metadata read enables IAM role abuse against the installer's cloud account.
During installation, package exfiltrates environment variables, tokens from cloud environments and fingerprints the environment. It identifies itself as a security testing engagement.
Category: MALICIOUS - The campaign has clearly malicious intent, like infostealers.
Campaign: 2026-09-praetorian-mind-rce-test-2026
Reasons (based on the campaign):
exfiltration-env-variables
The package contains code to exfiltrate basic data from the system, like IP or username. It has a limited risk.
exfiltration-cloud-tokens
The OpenSSF Package Analysis project identified 'praetorian-mind-rce-test-2026' @ 0.0.2 (pypi) as malicious.
It is considered malicious because:
praetorian-mind-rce-test-2026Refer to the advisory for the patched release.